Last week’s Halloween-themed episode of “9-1-1,” Buck (Oliver Stark) brings what he thinks is a dummy skeleton to a haunted house attraction hosted at the 118 fire station. To everyone’s horror, he later learns that the dummy is actually a real skeleton belonging to an Old West outlaw named Billy Boils, who Buck believes cursed him for accidentally removing one of its arms.
TheWrap spoke to the show’s prop master Bryce Moore, and his assistant Megan Casey about how they “Frankensteined” the skeleton. They also did a convincingly gruesome show-and-tell with it over Zoom and explained all the work put into the show’s other big prop from Season 8, Episode 5, an oversized pumpkin that gets stuck on a guy’s head.
TheWrap: How did you create the skeleton?
Bryce Moore [proudly showing off prop]: This is our Billy Boils right here. We started off with just a regular skeleton, and then we make the skin. Believe it or not [we use] cellophane [like] for your sandwiches. That’s how we get the wrinkled look. And then we paint the skin. It dries wrinkled, and it keeps the coloring. The coloring and aging really sells our bodies.
Is that a well-known trick in the industry?
BM: Well yes, everyone in the industry and in body making. You can bend it and see the texture and the skin moving. It’s very convincing. And then there’s our tendons. [Which lead Buck and the trick-or-treaters to realize that the skeleton is real]. It’s just rope that’s painted and colored.
What are the bones made out of?
It’s your regular Halloween bone that you can pick up on Amazon or in Halloween stores.
Megan Casey: You can buy them in anatomy classes across the world too.
So this is an artificial skeleton, because I understand there used to be a practice of using real human skeletons?
BM: Yeah, that’s something that we stopped doing in about the 1960s.
The rumor is that they used real skeletons in “Poltergeist.”
BM: That was an accident. They didn’t know that until it was too late. They get an order, the special effects and prop team, they fill the order, and they’re getting it all together before it’s too late. “Oh, by the way, these are real bodies,” so the information came at the end of the shoot, pretty much.
You said you had a few versions of the pumpkin that gets stuck on the guy’s head. Did you have a backup for the skeleton as well?
BM: We did. We made two skeletons, one that was a little scary, and one that wasn’t so scary, because we don’t want to scare the audience too much. And when it’s on set, it looks real. We use two skeletons in the process of making the mummified body. And we used pieces from one body, as we would say “Frankensteined” it together for the other body. We took arms off of one body, and put it on the other. We do that a lot. That’s how we do most of our quick fixes.
How much time do you usually have to work on a prop?
BM: Having bodies built takes about three to four days for us to get that scene ready, and that’s all the time we really had to do that. I work with a six-person team. We all pull together and work on it. They say 90% of the work is the prep.
Are you on set with “9-1-1” to make sure everything’s working?
BM: That’s where Megan comes in. I’m usually running and preparing everything for the next script and episode, and I do a run-through with Megan, our on-set prop master. She’ll have to make a couple changes here and there, do a little bit of tweaking and manufacturing, probably at the last minute.
For a show like this, we carry two prop trucks. We have a 48-foot prop truck that’s filled with everything from laptops to cell phones to flak jackets.We have badges, we have watches. You name it, we carry it. If they ask for it, we have to have it on hand. So I have to be ready for anything they could think of.
Bryce, you also worked on “24.” And with director David Fincher.
BM: Yes, I worked for David Fincher for 10 years. My father and myself were a father and son team, and we did most of the features with David Fincher. So like “Seven,” “The Game,” “Fight Club,” “Panic Room,” just to name a few.
So, in “Seven” was there ever a head in the box?
I could tell you what’s in the box… but nobody knows what’s in the box. [Pause] What we did was we put a brick and a half to get the weight correct [to match the weight of a human head]. When you do this job, you have to do research. I’ve been to the morgue a few times just to see how everything’s done. You have to educate yourself.
“9-1-1” will return with new episodes Thursday, Nov. 7. Previous episodes are now streaming on Hulu.
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